Market impact. It is part of the very fiber of Owen’s finance department. Members of the school’s finance faculty are not only contributing to the industry’s intellectual underpinnings and analytical tools but also training students who, as Vanderbilt alumni, are putting theory into practice worldwide.
Imagine going to see your dermatologist and leaving her office knowing you have several swollen lymph nodes. That is exactly what happened to me in early August 2009. I was told “run, don’t walk” to my primary care physician, which I did—the dermatologist’s office even called to make sure I had followed their directions.
Christopher Parks found himself facing an all-too-common dilemma. He and his mother, who was in the midst of cancer treatments, were sitting in her living room going through a stack of her medical bills and those of his father, who had died recently.
Ray Sumner, MBA’10, woke up in a bed with white sheets. He recognized his mother, who was holding his right hand. She had traveled from their family farm on Staten Island to keep vigil at his bedside in Bethesda Naval Hospital.
Some of the grandmothers—only in their 50s, but aged by the hardships of living in one of the world’s poorest places—liked the porridge so much that they started dancing, hopping on one foot and then the other, grinning toothless smiles and kicking dust onto their colorful skirts.
During lean economic times, many business owners look for a lifeboat. In the case of David Ingram, Chairman and President of Ingram Entertainment Inc. (IEI), his came in the form of beer. Or beer distribution, that is.
For Tom Clock, MBA’98, it all clicked when Owen’s fledgling rugby club carpooled to Fort Campbell, Ky., to take on a team from the 101st Airborne. “It was with those guys that I think we crystallized our identity,” says Clock. “Hanging out with them, we became a team.”
When investment banker Rob Louv, MBA’97, met with a Texas entrepreneur in 2008 about selling a company, neither was aware that they shared an important common link: Both had graduated from the Owen School. The entrepreneur, Jack Long, MBA’83, had contacted Louv’s San Francisco firm, Montgomery & Co., on reputation alone, but the coincidence helped him make up his mind about using Louv to shop his company to potential buyers.
During the 2009 spring semester, a group of 10 second-year students took part in the inaugural Real Estate Capstone course that saw them devise a long-term growth plan for downtown Lebanon, Tenn., a city just east of Nashville. The specific thrust involved transit-oriented development.
Fortunately for Rob Hunter, MBA’91, clients weren’t in the habit of visiting the original headquarters of his fledgling company, Alliance Communications. Had they walked into the office—actually, a trailer in a parking lot—in 1999, they might have noticed that Alliance, which manages sophisticated telecommunications for its clients, lacked a phone system capable even of transferring calls from one extension to another.
The 1995 conference sponsored by the Owen School’s Financial Markets Research Center is one that Adena Testa Friedman will not soon forget. Just two years removed from graduation, she was back on campus watching Bill Christie, a favorite professor of hers, endure a searing critique from his former mentor Merton Miller, a Nobel laureate in economics. And as if that weren’t awkward enough, Friedman was actually rooting against Christie.
Sharran Srivatsaa, MBA’08, remembers arriving in Tupelo, Miss., well after dark and encountering what most people would expect to see on a small-town Thursday night: very little. “There wasn’t much going on.” In the morning he saw the place, physically and figuratively, in an entirely different light.
They are among the nation’s most compelling potential customers— the nearly 100,000 men, women and children who are in line for the fewer than 30,000 organ transplants that will be performed this year. That staggering gap is caused both by a scarcity of donors and by the fact that only 70 to 80 percent of the organs actually harvested can be utilized because of problems with quality or preservation.
Grounded. In airplane parlance, it’s an ironic way to describe someone who oversees the fifth largest airline in the country, but that’s exactly how friends and colleagues of US Airways Chairman and CEO Doug Parker, MBA’86, view him. While he’s adept at managing the 30,000-foot view, they say he remains one of the most down-to-earth people they know—even as his embattled industry confronts soaring costs and plummeting customer satisfaction.